Facebook is the topic that never tires in Silicon Valley, and anticipation has reached fever pitch this week with rumours of arch-rivals Google and Microsoft battling it out for a 5-10% stake in the social networking site.

Facebook has given the tech industry plenty to talk about: astonishing growth, particularly in the UK, a strategy of reaching out to developers and start-ups through its application platform and the story of its child prodigy founder Mark Zuckerberg.

For the media industry this is a mystifying, powerful new world that they are desperate to tap. What would most UK media organisations give for the kind of coverage, audience and cunningly addictive service that Facebook has manage to nail down since it opened outside the college circuit in September last year?

This attention has generated something approaching an obsession among acquisition executives (and, it has to be said, journalists) in finding The Next Facebook. It is likely, even given the success of the site, that it will follow that cycle of hype and be replaced by some cheeky upstart someway further down the line. Either that, or it will be replaced by a myriad of new social networking sites that fulfill more niche community needs, and that's probably a more realistic place to start.

PerfSpot raised a few eyebrows last month when it was listed by web measurement firm Nielsen Online as the fastest growing social networking site in the UK, overtaking Facebook during August this year.

Though far fewer users than Facebook, its UK userbase grew 756% in four months to 274,000 unique users during August, with a global usership of 1.8m.

Setting up a profile on PerfSpot - as in "perfect spot" - is pretty much like any other social networking site, so what marks it out?

PerfSpot's founder and chief executive Hart Cunningham is quite the opposite of those accidental entrepreneurs that start out hacking some clever solution to some tech challenge at home, and then end up building a business with it. He's a business school graduate with as CV littered in web start-ups but has, so far, run the site without venture backing, instead starting the site with $2m he made from web advertising firm Alansis Media and a technical support service Juvio.

We know the peculiarities of web metrics, but Cunningham claims the site's global reach is far beyond the Nielsen figures - more like 15-18m with 4.5m registered users. From a commercial point of view, Cunningham has made some shrewd moves: like basing his 84-person team in Arizona, where he claims wages are a third of those in Silicon Valley.

The PerfSpot call centre?

Its USP is, he hopes, to be extremely strict on spam and privacy, and hot on customer service. That unusually large staff team is down to the site's customer service call centre, building society style.

If that seems an unusually labour-intensive route for a web business - not least a costly one, because the helplines are free for users - then it is worth considering the rationale: PerfSpot wants to be mainstream, reaching far beyond the tech savvy early adopters and those prepared to dabble with HTML on their MySpace pages.

"There are lots of people that don't know how to use Facebook or MySpace," said Cunningham. Phoning someone in a call centre omits the embarrassment of having to ask someone else, and that's not something you can do with Facebook or MySpace. It might be far more costly than sticking up an FAQ page, but there is a demand: the customer service department handles 100,000 emails and 3,000 calls each week.

"The most common requests are people trying to find friends, and people saying that someone stole their ID. It is really about customer retention. If you look at traditional businesses, it's the customer service that people like and that they can respond to, and that won't change."

PerfSpot is strategically launching new territories and has 32 different language versions. Of all those, India will soon be the biggest territory with 1m registered users, and that growth has been because the site is translated into seven regional languages including Urdu, Tamil and Hindi.

Party photos

Another of PerfSpot's offerings is a party photos service called PerfNights. The site employs more than 800 professional photographers in 84 cities who photograph dancing party-goers (rather than drunken party-goers, presumably), give them a card and then invite them to view the photos on the site. That's proving an area with further potential to generate income, with various brands including Coke and Sony keen to advertise on the cards handed out to all those party goers.

Keeping up with competition

In the spirit of web start-ups both inspired and daunted by the dominance of MySpace and Bebo and the rise of Facebook, Cunningham is bullish about further opportunities in the social networking sector. He says the site already makes $1m revenue each month, which isn't bad for nine months in business.

The dominance of Facebook and the rest of the big three is good, said Cunningham, because it educates more and more of the audience. But these sites are constantly competing with features and for users' time.

"It's a good thing that the market is so gigantic, but we have to keep up with the speed of the competition and it is difficult to keep up with new features," said Cunningham. "Our priority is in our customer support team, adding new features and in getting things to work quicker."

In short, if you need hand holding, you're obsessively anti-spam or you fancy being papped when you're out, PerfSpot might be for you.

Is PerfSpot the next Facebook? Probably not. But we don't need one just yet anyway.